The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics [Paperback]

M. M. Bakhtin (Author), Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev (Author)

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Review

With this critical study... the most exhaustive Marxist analysis and refutation of Russian formalism has become available to English readers.

(Modern Language Journal )

Language Notes

Text: English, Russian (translation) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press; 1 edition (October 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801843189
• ISBN-13: 978-0801843181
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #964,999 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Jeffrey Rubard (Beaverton, OR US) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics (Paperback)

The work of the "Bakhtin school" -- Mikhail Bakhtin, Pavel Mevedev and Valentin Voloshinov -- during the 1920s has attracted *sub rosa* attention in the US since a translation of Voloshinov's *Marxism And The Philosophy Of Language* was published in 1973; and although an interest in Bakhtin later non-Marxist on "dialogism" has caused the authorship of that book and *The Formal Method In Scholarship* (to a certain extent always in question in the Soviet Union) to be a source of major interest, these books demand study as works separate from that phase of Bakhtin's intellectual development.

Furthermore, although *Marxism and the Philosophy of Language* contains remarks on many topics (e.g., indirect discourse) which would be of acute interest to analytic philosophers, that actually makes this more recently translated work a solider introduction to literary study with critical intent. The intriguing remarks of Voloshinov/Bakhtin are nearly all programmatic, but this study of the earlier period of Russian formalist analysis (works from which can be found in the recently translated *Problems of Idealism*) is thoroughly *substantive*.

In the hands of Bakhtin and Medvedev, "the study of ideologies" is extremely wide-ranging and *never* without its social component, like many works of early Marxist philosophy which prefigure "externalism" (Hilary Putnam remarks upon this at one point in his "Meaning of Meaning"-era papers). But it does not exhaust the field of signification, giving the methods given here as appropriate for investigating literary works formalistically a quite definite cast: this work has more in common with *The Anatomy of Criticism* than *Anti-Duehring*, although Bakhtin did not partake of Frye's high-structuralist Bicycle-deck (that is, *als ob* but never *gegenstaendlich*) attitude to signification. As a result, "post-structuralist" approaches to authorial intent may find a more comfortable ground for interfacing with structuralism without losing the flexibility necessary to do close reading here.